How Should I Reach You for Marketing Purposes?

Question

As a decision-maker at a tech company, I get dozens of cold emails per day from marketers/salespeople trying to sell me their product. Some are more creative than others, but they all have a similar theme, basically be personalized enough to break through and make a "personal" connection, then hook for more information. If I never read the expression "let's jump on a call" again it will be too soon lolI have told many people that I hate this and that it doesn't work and that I think it's scummy and tend to turn against companies that contact me that way.I was recently asked, "well, how should I get your attention for marketing opportunities?"I realized I didn't have a great answer, so I wanted to execute a broad query over the HN userbase and see what others think.Suppose you built a cool product that you believe can help people, and you need to get their attention. What is the best/correct/ethical way to do that?

epc · Accepted Answer

Buy advertising, get press coverage, write blog posts, talk at conferences (or post online videos) about problems solved by the cool product.
I once was publicly identified as the web guy at an F100 company and it was a fucking nightmare of "Hey, I just wanted to touch base" messaging from hundreds of marketing and sales guys every week. And this was before they all had the genius idea to automate sales outreach with "AI".
And I know the retort will be "just ignore it" but what happens is they start to annoy your coworkers and other things. I had one guy who figured out where I lived and harassed my doorman to find out when I came and went.
I do not even work now and I still get a dozen inbound sales calls and messages a week. I ignore all of them.

meristohm · Answer

My knee-jerk reaction is "you shouldn't; we churn enough resources as it is", but if I broaden the scope of "product" to include elements of culture, for example the idea that it's okay to not have everything we want, then your question is interesting.
I would promote birth-to-three (or six or seven) programs for everyone, so that children have a better chance to grow up in a nurturing environment, one in which the adults don't shout or act violently towards their children and generally minimize trauma, which I think would go a long way towards children keeping their curiosity and intellectual humility and gaining emotional awareness rather than have these good things suppressed by fear. As this increases, I would guess we'll see less capitalism, and less need to sell my cool product.
The more we can do with what we have around us, including using our bodies to do more of the work of living, the better. If the land can't carry us, don't live there, at least not until it recovers.
This may be a foreign concept to many? I find a sense of peace and purpose going out each day to these few acres and picking an increasingly varied collection of plants, as I learn from public library books what is edible. This is a cool product I picked up from books in childhood and have revisited and expanded during my second childhood (parenting).
I'm curious to read how others respond.